Developed barium fluoride-based borate glass: Ag2O impacts on optical and gamma-ray attenuation properties

Abstract

A quaternary glass system was fabricated via the melting quenching method. The mentioned glass system consists of five samples described by the chemical composition 50B2O3 + 30BaF2 + (20-x)Li2O + xAg2O, 0.0 < x < 6 mol%. Archimedes method illustrates that the glasses density increased from 3.2681 g/cm3 to 3.4851 g/cm3. The optical properties of the fabricated glass samples were also estimated from the absorbance recorded by the JASCO UV–Vis–NIR spectrophotometer. The direct energy gap decreased from 3.16 to 2.92 eV. Simultaneously, the refractive index increased from 3.65 to 4.88 with increasing the AgO2 doping ratio. Moreover, the shielding parameters showed a significant enhancement with increasing the Ag2O insertion ratio, where the linear attenuation coefficient enhanced from 112.69 to 124.012 cm−1 at g 0.015 MeV. The transmission factor (TF, %) was enhanced by increasing the Ag2O concentrations in the glass network as well as growing the glass thickness.